Linux Container Primitives
cgroups, namespaces, and union filesystems

Presented by:

Samuel Karp is a Senior Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services, working on the Container Services team. For the past four years, Sam has helped build and operate Amazon Elastic Container Service and AWS Fargate. Sam has been a Linux enthusiast since 2004 and a container enthusiast since 2014.

In this session, we'll explore the different Linux primitives that are commonly used in implementing container runtimes. We'll learn about the Linux primitives that underlie container runtimes like Docker, including cgroups, namespaces, and union filesystems. We'll see how Docker uses these primitives, and how the OCI standard makes it possible to customize how your containers run. We'll also discuss alternative container runtimes like CRI-O, rkt, and systemd-nspawn and what makes them different. This will be an interactive session with a live demo and open questions.

This tool is
free software,
released under the
MIT license.
You can run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve it.
The source code and the developers are on
GitHub.
Performance data is available on
Skylight.